Scum adds anti-cheat to fight the real scum

It’s always galling to be murdered when you’re on the pot, but doubly so when killed by a cheater. The ‘DayZ but with robots and pooing’ survival sandbox Scum has (hopefully?) solved that shitty problem over the weekend by adding anti-cheat tech, which is a feature I’m honestly surprised to hear a high-profile murderous multiplayer game had launched without. Known cheats for Scum included an aimbot, a wallhack with labels and healthbars over players, teleporting to the location of another player, infinite ammo… bad things.

“Anticheat is up an running. We will continue to upgrade it, and keep Scum as cheat free as possible!” the devs said in Sunday’s patch notes. “P.S – Also using exploits will be considered cheating and can result in a ban.”

The post also notes a number of bug and exploit fixes, as well as the addition of server admin controls. Scum recently removed some Nazi tattoos and all.

Scum only launched into early access last Wednesday, so it didn’t go mega-long without anti-cheat, but it’s still weird. Ah well, now anti-cheat is in, and the endless arms race between cheat-makers and cheat-blockers will begin in earnest.

I believe Fraser Brown has been banged up playing Scum for his next Premature Evaluation column, and will tell us all about it tomorrow.

Scum is out now on Steam Early Access, priced at £15.49/€16.79/$19.99. It’s made by Gamepires together with Croteam, and published by Devolver Digital. The plan is for it to be in early access for at least one year, so there’s still a long way to go.

Scum has already raced up the charts to become one of Steam’s most-played games, with 30,000 people in-game as I write this, though DayZ was also a hit out the gate and has since stalled. But hey, the scrappy wild west days of a multiplayer early access game can be exciting, a time when everyone is still learning everything. It’s always a shame that these sorts of games tend to be shonky during that phase of their life, that these fleeting moments rarely come when a game feels polished – or at least runs well.